Norton begins relationships with Pelletier and Espinoza

Liz Norton’s relationships with Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza begin after the two critics recognize that their pursuit of Benno von Archimboldi cannot fill their lives: they can study and dissect the writer, but cannot share ordinary grief or laughter with him. Their response is not to abandon their friendship but to make room for desire, disclosure, and the possibility of love. Norton’s concurrent relationships unsettle Espinoza, yet the men’s eventual conversation turns potential rivalry into a deliberate act of trust, left open-ended in Pelletier’s decision to leave matters to fate.

From the Search to Intimacy

While walking around Sankt Pauli, Pelletier and Espinoza see the limits of making Archimboldi the center of their lives. His distance and the consuming nature of literary study leave them wanting a form of connection that their work cannot provide. Later, at Mrs. Bubis’s house, surrounded by photographs of the late Mr. Bubis and his writers, they reach the blunt conclusion that they want to make love, not war. Their exchange frames the relationships that follow: intimacy emerges not from a contest over the writer, but from the friends’ recognition that scholarship cannot substitute for living together.

The first relationship to begin is Pelletier’s. Three days after meeting Archimboldi’s publisher, he arrives in London without warning and takes Norton to dinner at a restaurant in Hammersmith. The extravagant meal includes goulash, chickpea purée with beets, fish marinated in lemon and yogurt, vodka, and Bordeaux; its candles, violins, and waiters playing at being Russian make the occasion feel conspicuously staged. Norton invites Pelletier home under the stated pretext of discussing Archimboldi and what Mrs. Bubis had disclosed, including the critic Schleiermacher’s contempt for Archimboldi’s first book. They laugh, Pelletier kisses her tactfully, and she responds more ardently. They go to bed together, and Norton falls asleep afterward.

Norton and Espinoza in Madrid

Espinoza’s relationship with Norton develops through invitation and candid disclosure. He asks her to visit Madrid, offering to host her and pointing to the city’s beauty and a Bacon retrospective. Norton accepts immediately, surprising him: he had expressed a wish more than an expectation. He is excited and insecure, but arranges a Sunday he hopes will make her happy. They sleep together that night, listening for drums from next door that never sound. Espinoza has many questions, but asks none; Norton tells him that she and Pelletier are lovers, although she uses a more ambiguous term, perhaps describing them as friends or saying they have been seeing each other.

Her account of intimacy is expansive and not organized around an exclusive partnership. Norton says she has many friends, without clarifying whether she means friends in the ordinary sense or lovers, and describes this as a pattern dating back to her first sexual experience at sixteen with a thirty-four-year-old musician from Pottery Lane. She also tells Espinoza that she was married and is now divorced. The disclosures do not give him the certainty he wants: he admires her as a scholar and critic, but admits that he is unsure whether he truly knows her. His restraint is telling. Naked beside her, he wants to ask how she understands love and sex, yet responds only by nodding.

Espinoza’s participation brings pleasure as well as acute anxiety. The prospect of seeing Norton again unsettles him, and he fears the implications for his friendship with Pelletier. After calming himself with a promise not to take the relationship further, he calls Norton four days later and asks to see her. She chooses Madrid. She arrives on Saturday evening and leaves Sunday night; Espinoza drives her to El Escorial, and they attend a flamenco show. They make love for three hours on Saturday, then again after showering the next day. Where Norton had previously talked after sex, this time she says she is exhausted and goes to sleep. The difference leaves the relationship intimate but not fully explained through conversation.

Disclosure and the Test of Friendship

On the drive back from El Escorial, Espinoza asks whether Norton has seen Pelletier. She says that she has and that Pelletier was in London. Espinoza becomes nervous and concentrates on driving as he asks how Pelletier is. Norton says that Pelletier is fine and that she has told him about her and Espinoza. The disclosure changes the immediate stakes: the relationship is no longer a secret known only to Norton and Espinoza, though Espinoza still has to confront what Pelletier makes of it.

Norton’s earlier disclosures about her ex-husband also sharpen Espinoza’s unease. She describes him as very tall, unstable, and potentially dangerous, with a narrow cultural world centered on old pub songs and television. At first, hearing these stories contributes to Espinoza’s distress; during the later Madrid visit, they no longer affect him in the same way. His attention has shifted from the account of her former marriage to the more immediate question of how he and Pelletier can remain friends while both are involved with Norton.

Fate, Not Rivalry

Pelletier calls Espinoza on Sunday night after Espinoza has driven Norton to the airport. He says he knows Espinoza understands what is happening. Espinoza welcomes the call and says that he had intended to call Pelletier that very night, but Pelletier reached him first. Pelletier says he believes him. Their brief exchange matters because it replaces concealment with direct acknowledgment: neither man pretends that Norton’s relationships are unknown, and neither turns the call into an accusation.

When Espinoza asks what they should do, Pelletier answers that they should leave everything in the hands of fate. The unresolved answer avoids setting rules for the relationships or promising a settled arrangement. Instead, the two men begin talking and laugh together about a strange conference in Salonika to which only Piero Morini had been invited. The shift to shared humor gives their friendship a life beyond the question of Norton, while the reference to Morini’s mild episode of blindness places their conversation within the critics’ continuing world of travel and literary work.

An Open-Ended Triangle

The relationships do not resolve into a conventional choice between the two men. Norton tells each what she is doing with the other, while Pelletier and Espinoza address the situation directly and preserve their conversation as friends. Espinoza’s nervousness and silence show that this openness does not make the arrangement simple; he struggles to ask what he wants to know and initially worries over its effect on Pelletier. But the sequence ends not with a breakup, confrontation, or declaration of exclusivity, but with the two men laughing together after entrusting the outcome to fate.

That ending echoes the earlier contrast between literary pursuit and lived connection. Archimboldi remains distant and his work can consume its interpreters, whereas love here takes the form of specific, imperfect encounters: a costly London dinner, a weekend in Madrid, sex followed by sleep, a tense question in a car, and a phone call after the airport drop-off. The relationship’s significance lies less in a settled romantic structure than in the way it tests whether friendship can survive desire without denying its complications.